Only in Waterbury

This morning as I was getting ready for work, I took a quick look at the Republican-American and saw this on the front page:

Dads in school questioned

News last week that fathers were volunteer patrols at a city middle school has some Board of Education members questioning the safety of the program.

Having read, and supported, the concepts listed in the original article, I was quite curious and concerned as to whom on the Board of Education could possibly object to increased parental involvement?

During the seven years I taught at Wilby, getting parents to show up for events such as football games, parent-teacher conferences, and school plays was a constant struggle. There were a myriad of reasons why the parents couldn't make it, some of them disappointing (the few parents that didn't place a priority on education), but most of them quite understandable (the parents working late to support the family). Whatever the reasons were, the fact remained, we always had to work to get the parents to show up.

Now we have a program at West Side that seems to be working. Three fathers who are taking the time to provide the school with an extra set of eyes and the ability to keep the hallways clear. How could anyone find a problem with this? Isn't this one of the four main goals of the Waterbury Public Schools? With these questions spinning in my head, I turned to the local section to see who had raised the alarm.

Once I got to the article itself, I found a drastically different story then the one presented on the front page. In the article, four of the ten members of the Board of Education are mentioned by name. Commissioner Flaherty-Merritt is mentioned as reminding the Board that the program in question was discussed at an earlier workshop, and Commissioner Stango commented that programs like this are endorsed by Parent Teacher Organizations throughout the US.

The only members of the Board of Education to mention safety concerns in the article were Commissioners D'Angelo and Theriault. Both Commissioners suggested that people who wish to volunteer in a school setting should be fingerprinted, and put through a background check. Neither Commissioner has anything negative to say about the program at West Side, and expressed a desire to err on the side of caution.

When one considers that these protocols are in place for all teachers, substitutes, and mentors, it seems like a logical step to include volunteers.

As unusual as it may sound, after I finished reading the article, I was more upset then when I started. Once again the editors of the newspaper felt the need to sensationalize a story just to grab the readers attention. Furthermore, they felt the need to do so at the public schools expense.

Mr. Puffer seems to have written an article that addresses both the benefits and concerns of the program at West Side, and does so without overtly editorializing. So why do the editors feel the need to present the story on the front page in a manner that would cause most parents to keep their children at home? Why take a veiled shot at the public schools when the administration at West Side is doing something right? It is the latest version of a question that I have been asking myself for years, and I don't know if there's a satisfactory answer.

However, if Waterbury is ever going to recover from its problem of perception, there needs to be a change of attitude in the local media. Those that run the Republican American need to stop portraying the city as a decrepit hulk of shame and disgrace. They need to start admitting that there are things being done to improve the City of Waterbury, and they need to give these accomplishments the credit they deserve. Until that is done, Waterbury will always have an uphill struggle.